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Romney Makes a Push for Black Voters

Four years ago, Barack Obama captured 95 percent of the black vote. But in a 2012 election in which every vote may matter, Mitt Romney is not conceding an inevitable rout on that front.

On Wednesday, Mr. Romney will make a pitch to the nation’s premier civil rights group, the N.A.A.C.P., testing President Obama’s overwhelming support among black voters by trying to pry away some defectors with his pro-jobs message at a time of 14.4 percent unemployment among African-Americans.

Mr. Obama is passing up the chance to address the 103-year-old group at its annual convention in Houston and is sending Vice President Joseph R. Biden Jr. instead.

While blacks are expected to solidly back Mr. Obama again this year, he faces challenges in generating the same enthusiasm as in 2008. The level of black turnout could be especially crucial in states like North Carolina and Virginia, where black voters had an outsize influence in the president’s relatively narrow victories four years ago.

“In 2008, he won North Carolina by about 14,000 votes,” said Bill Randall, a black Republican who lost a recent primary for a Congressional seat in the state. But “support is waning” he said, adding that the president’s “policies are not doing things that are going to spur economic growth.”

Other black leaders said Mr. Romney would need more than an economic message to improve on Senator John McCain’s dismal level of black support in 2008 and return to the 11 percent that George W. Bush won in 2004, according to exit polls.

“Romney could do much better than John McCain,” said Benjamin Todd Jealous, the president of the N.A.A.C.P. But his message on jobs and the economy “is not resonating with our base,” Mr. Jealous said, in part because talk of deregulation brings to mind Wall Street bailouts and how General Motors might have gone bankrupt if Mr. Romney had been in the White House.

“If he’s going to pick up more support in the black community,” Mr. Jealous said, “he has to send a message that he’s prepared to lead on issues that we care about.”

Topping the list is a wave of voter identification laws that Democrats say will suppress minority participation in November. “We are living through the greatest wave of legislative assaults on voting rights in more than a century,” Mr. Jealous said Monday in his opening speech at the convention. “In the past year, more states have passed more laws pushing more voters out of the ballot box than at any time since the rise of Jim Crow.”

Nearly a dozen states have passed strict voter ID laws in the last two years, largely with the support of Republican lawmakers, who say they are needed to prevent fraud. Democrats argue that the laws are really meant to suppress turnout by poor and minority voters, who tend to vote Democratic and who disproportionately lack government-issued identification.

Photo

Mitt Romney visited students in a poor black neighborhood of West Philadelphia in May. On Wednesday, Mr. Romney will speak at an N.A.A.C.P. event in an effort to increase his appeal to black voters.Credit
Mark Makela for The New York Times

The issue caused a stir recently when a top Republican official in Pennsylvania said the state’s new voter ID law would allow Mr. Romney to carry the state.

Texas, as it happens, is one of the states with a tough new law, which is the subject of a federal court hearing in Washington this week as the N.A.A.C.P. meets in Houston. The Justice Department has found that the law will “disenfranchise at least 600,000 voters,” many of them members of minority groups. The state is challenging the ruling and a crucial provision of the Voting Rights Act of 1965.

Speaking to the N.A.A.C.P. on Tuesday, Attorney General Eric H. Holder Jr. sharply criticized the Republican-backed state laws, noting that 25 percent of eligible black voters nationally lack a photo ID, but only 8 percent of whites do.

It is unlikely that Mr. Romney will tell civil rights leaders what they are hoping to hear about voter ID laws, since he has rarely weighed in on the issue. A spokeswoman for the campaign, Andrea Saul, summarized his position in an e-mail: “Governor Romney believes that every legal vote should count.”

Although the Romney campaign recently named an adviser to help frame its message to black voters, and in May the candidate visited a charter school in a poor black neighborhood of West Philadelphia, most of his courtship of minorities has been focused on Hispanics, who could play a crucial role in swing states like Colorado, Florida and Nevada.

There is another possible calculation for Mr. Romney’s N.A.A.C.P. appearance: he may not win over many black voters, but he will appear more moderate to independent and undecided whites.

Surveys show that black voters still overwhelmingly support the president. In the latest Gallup weekly tracking poll, 87 percent approved of the job Mr. Obama is doing. But Mr. Jealous said it would be difficult for the president to inspire the same turnout among black voters as in 2008: the historic import of his candidacy for blacks has passed, and people are still struggling in a stalled economy.

It might appear that Mr. Obama is taking black voters for granted by skipping the N.A.A.C.P. event, which he attended four years ago. Mr. Jealous said the president had signaled as recently as a week ago that he would speak to the group, but his office said he had a scheduling conflict. Mr. Biden, who also enjoys strong support among blacks, will speak on Thursday.

Mr. Obama is focused this week on countering a disappointing jobs report released last Friday — proposing on Monday to extend a middle-class tax cut, a message he planned to repeat Tuesday at grass-roots events in Iowa.

One factor in the president’s favor may be that as a result of his success and that of other black politicians, the size of the minority electorate has grown, said Katherine Tate, a political scientist at the University of California, Irvine.

“Black voters are regularly participating in politics nowadays because of their elected numbers in government,” she said. “An African-American member of Congress once said that because of Obama his mother now watches cable news regularly and talks to him regularly and heatedly about policy matters.”

A version of this article appears in print on July 11, 2012, on page A16 of the New York edition with the headline: Romney Makes a Push for Black Voters. Order Reprints|Today's Paper|Subscribe